Bonjour!
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Oprah Winfrey is joined by Paralympic bronze medalist and Dancing with the Stars finalist Amy Purdy for an inspiring conversation about rising above your circumstances, living with spiritual courage and the power of visualizing your dreams.

Amy Purdy, Toyota Brand Ambassador with Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, recipient of the Toyota “Standing O-Vation” Award on Saturday, November 15, 2014 at the SAP Center at San Jose in San Jose, California during Oprah’s The Life You Want Weekend.

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Amy Purdy

“A Champion’s Champion” snowboarding

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from The Hartford

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At 19, after experiencing flu-like symptoms, Amy Purdy was rushed to the hospital in a state of septic shock. En route, she experienced respiratory and multiple organ failure which caused her to lose circulation to her extremities. When she entered the hospital she was given less than a 2 percent chance of survival, put on life support and placed into a coma. After multiple blood transfusions, and the removal of her ruptured spleen, doctors diagnosed Amy with Meningococcal Meningitis. Due to the lack of circulation she had suffered, doctors had to amputate her legs below the knee. She later received a donated kidney from her father a week before her 21st birthday.

After going through this life-altering experience, Amy challenged herself to move on with her life and attain goals that even those who have both legs struggle to achieve. Just three months after her kidney transplant, Amy entered the USASA National Snowboarding Championship where she won medals in three events. Today, she is one of the top ranked adaptive snowboarders in the world, has won multiple World Cup medals.

Amy’s creativity, positive outlook and her never give up attitude have opened doors to many other opportunities including being featured in a Madonna music video, a lead actress role in an award winning independent film and multiple creative modeling projects including a photo shoot with musician and artist Nikki Sixx where her legs were custom made from steel to look like ice picks.

Amy is most proud of co-founding Adaptive Action Sports. Created in 2005, AAS is a non-profit organization which helps those with permanent disabilities to get involved in action sports. AAS has partnered with ESPN and runs “adaptive” action sport competitions at the summer and winter ESPN X Games. These events were instrumental in getting adaptive snowboarding added to the Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games.

Amy works closely with The Hartford, a Founding Partner of U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, helping to positively change public attitudes and perceptions about disabilities. To learn more about Amy, visit http://www.teamusa.org/Athletes/PU/Amy-Purdy.

Your success begins within.

True success is a joyful creative process that you can access and build upon each day to bring more brilliance, abundance, and innate prosperity into every aspect of your life. In this illuminating three-week journey, we will be your guides, every day, as you travel a path from limiting beliefs to discovering within yourself that your successes can be infinite.

I am truly baffled at how evangelicals, of all people, can’t see the positive possibilities that Rob Bell creates by engaging lots of people– lots of non-Christian, agnostic, atheistic, skeptical people– in discussions about God.

Consider: The OWN channel is in 85 million homes worldwide. Oprah reaches millions of people every year, and sometimes in a single episode. What kind of confused evangelical would look at those numbers and say, “You know what would be terrible? If a Christian had his own talk show on that network. That would be really awful news”? What’s more, Bell is known for being someone people enjoy listening to. He’s engaging, he talks in normal English, he illustrates and weaves stories together masterfully.Of all people, evangelicals should know this, because they almost single-handedly are responsible for the 2.5 million Nooma videos that were sold, not to mention his sold out speaking tours and multiple best-selling books. Apparently, that was all okay, but now that he’s planning to bring that same energy and message to people outside of the walls of mega-churches, to the millions of people who haven’t yet heard him talk about God or the Bible or Jesus or pursuing this beautiful, justice-and-mercy-filled way of life, it’s not OK?

That makes absolutely no sense. Not for anyone, but certainly not for evangelicals.

If Oprah calls you up and invites you to share your thoughts on your faith, what kind of a moron would you have to be to say no? Would evangelicals really rather someone NOT be talking about God? Is it really that dire? Is Rob Bell so bad, so different from you, that silence is the better option? Because that’s what evangelicals currently have with broader culture: silence. Crickets. The vast majority of America has tuned them out. What kind of special prize do evangelicals think they are getting by not connecting with the very people they say they want to reach?

Sure, Rob Bell goes for the big picture. He sets a mood, he captivates people’s imaginations and attentions. He’s not holding lectures on minor points of doctrine. Of course, that’s why people are listening to him.

Rob Bell understands how people who are outside of organized religion feel about things. He gets how they see the world. And he gets how to connect how they see the world with how he sees the story of Jesus, the narrative of Scripture, the work of the kingdom. That is fantastic news. We should all send him a holy high-five and tell him to keep talking. Because let’s be honest: American people have about had it with listening to religious anything. They are fed up with the meanness and the judging and the battles with science and the fundamentalism and it’s enough for them to tune out the whole conversation before it even gets underway. If Rob Bell knows how to talk to people about their souls, how to help people examine their lives and think about meaning and purpose and seek to love and care for others, and he can do so while reaching millions upon millions of people, he is not just an evangelical. He is a better evangelical than all the rest of us.

Using their own relationship as an example, Rob Bell, the charismatic author and pastor, and his wife,Kristen, share insights gleaned from over 20 years of their own ups and downs, joys and struggles, and share their keys to building a healthy and lasting relationship.

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Released October 2014

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When you focus on the positive in every moment, you learn to see life with a new perspective. Let Rob Bell’s new OCourse be your silver lining.Click on link below for the course syllabus.

In 2011 Time Magazine named Rob Bell on its list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

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I had first heard about Rob Bell during Oprah’s “The Life You Want Weekend” during her 8 city tour Fall 2014. Pastor Rob Bell was one of Oprah featured trailblazer thought leaders that took part in each city.

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Other featured in Oprah’s tour were trailblazers Deepak Chopra, bestselling author, public speaker and medical doctor. Iyanla Vanzant, inspirational speaker, best selling author, lawyer, minister spiritual teacher, life coach and television personality; Mark Nepo a poet, philosopher and best selling spiritual writer and Elizabeth Gilbert, best selling author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist.

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Rob Bell is a pastor, best selling author (see some of Rob’s books below) and writer of spiritual short films. Pastor Bell was the founder of Mars Hill Bible Church located in Grandville, Michigan, which he pastored until 2012. Under his leadership Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America. The short video directly below is from his book “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”. Pastor Bell has an e-course below titled “Rob Bell’s Guide to Finding Joy and Meaning in Everyday Life”.

This six-lesson eCourse is offered on demand. You will be able to stream all of Rob’s teaching videos and access the online course materials at anytime. So take the course at your own pace and return to the materials throughout your journey toward finding joy and meaning in everyday life!-

In The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage, the new book byRob Bell and his wife of more than 20 years, Kristen, the authors reveal the one question every person needs to ask his or her partner in life: What do you need?
–Kristen says that query is especially useful in times of conflict. “I think when you get in that spot of being defensive or [keeping] the scorecard, like holding back, when you sit down and say,‘What do you need?’ it’s a different energy,” she says. “It’s like you’re moving towards the person instead of away from the person.”-In the video clip below, Rob shares how the question can also benefit the person who asks it.

--Tune in to Super Soul Sunday February 15th at 11 a.m. ET/PT. You can also join our worldwide simulcast on Oprah.com/supersoulsunday or Facebook.com/supersoulsunday.

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Twice as Nice

Those in the Eastern time zone have two (2) times they can watch Super Soul Sunday – 11:00am ET & 2:00pm ET. -

Through humor, big ideas, and practical everyday ideas, Rob Bell, pastor and author takes you on a wondrous path toward deeper joy and meaning in all the small moments that create the foundation of wholeness, fulfillment and growth. How do you infuse every ordinary moment with spirit and light?

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There was a story I came across where a police officer drew his gun, cursing and frisked (ordered them get down on their knees with there hands up) a couple of African-American teens during a snowball fight. It was video taped and it’s heart breaking.

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I did not include it because the short video video below with Ruby Bridges puts the Ferguson and Eric Garner cases sums up these sad situations and her unique perspective nails it..

As soon as Ruby entered the school, white parents pulled their own children out; all the teachers refused to teach while a black child was enrolled. Only one person agreed to teach Ruby and that was Barbara Henry, from Boston, Massachusetts, and for over a year Henry taught her alone, “as if she were teaching a whole class.”

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​U.S. Marshals escorted Bridges to and from school

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President Barack Obama has taken a decidedly low-key approach to racial issues since he became America’s first black president two years ago. But in a hallway outside the Oval Office, he has placed a head-turning painting depicting one of the ugliest racial episodes in U.S. history.

Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” installed in the White House last month, shows U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community.

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The thrust of the painting is not subtle. America’s vilest racial epithet appears in letters several inches high at the top of the canvas. To the left side, the letters “KKK”are plainly visible. The crowds, mostly women who gathered daily to taunt Bridges as she went to a largely empty school, are not shown in the picture. But the racist graffiti and a splattered tomato convey the hostile atmosphere.

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​Present Obama approved bringing the painting to the West Wing

of the White House_July 16, 2011

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On July 15, 2011, Ruby Bridges met with President Barack Obama at the White House, and while viewing the Norman Rockwell painting of her on display he told her,“I think it’s fair to say that if it hadn’t been for you guys, I might not be here and we wouldn’t be looking at this together.”